‘The Potential for Terrorism Is Pretty Frightening’: A Conversation with Gary LaFree

By Greg Berman

When terrorists hijacked and crashed planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, criminologist Gary LaFree was teaching at the University of Maryland, where he had built a career researching global and domestic crime. In fact, in the ’90s, LaFree was awarded two grants by The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation to support his research on global homicide rates, as well as race and crime. But the events of 9/11 forever changed the trajectory of his career.

Before the attacks, the field of criminology did not take much interest in terrorism, according to LaFree. “In fact, at the turn of the twenty-first century, it was not at all clear that most criminologists considered terrorism and politically motivated violence to be a legitimate part of criminology,” he says.

LaFree was determined to change that. In the years that followed, he focused his energies on studying terrorism and violent political extremism. In 2005, he helped found the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, where he still sits as a professor emeritus. START, among other things, maintains a global terrorism database that provides researchers with data about global and domestic incidents of terrorism from 1970 to the present.

LaFree has largely succeeded in his quest. Today, the study of political extremism has been widely accepted into mainstream criminology. In 2024, LaFree received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, the most prestigious award in the field.

LaFree recently sat down with Greg Berman, the distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, to talk about the current state of political extremism, terrorism, and polarization in the United States. The following transcript of their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Greg Berman: How did you come to be an expert in terrorism?  

Gary LaFree: It was kind of serendipitous. I have an undergraduate degree in history, and I’ve always been interested in archives and in longitudinal data. I was at the University of Maryland, and I had been doing a lot of work on international homicide rates. One of my graduate students told me about this data set being collected by the Pinkerton Global Intelligence Service. This is the old detective agency. It turns out they’re still around and located in northern Virginia. So I take the subway out to visit them. And these guys have been collecting data on terrorism for fifty years. They’d hire former intelligence officers when they retired to help them collect the data. When businesses would send people to a place like Zimbabwe and they would want to know what the terrorism risk was, Pinkerton would give them the information and then sell them a bunch of other products. 

Anyway, it turned out Pinkerton was phasing out that end of their business. And when I looked at the data, it looked exactly like international homicide data. Essentially, you have cases on one axis and variables on the other. So I sort of naively thought, “Well, I’ve been doing all this work on one kind of violence. Why not just move over to a different type of violence?” This was around 2000.

And then 9/11 happens. Pinkerton had allowed me to carry all of their archival data on terrorism to my office in Maryland. Suddenly, I’m sitting on this huge cache of terrorism data, and there was a great amount of interest. The US government was not really interested in terrorism until 9/11. It was really a secondary concern up until then—even organizations like the FBI didn’t devote that many resources to it. Pinkerton actually had more data on terrorism, collected from open sources, than the government did. 

When you take a step back and look at the data about terrorism over the decades, what trends do you see?

First off, the data only goes back so far. This whole enterprise was made possible by the invention of satellite technology and handheld cameras. That made it possible to sit in Washington and gather data on other parts of the world through the media. So basically, most of the data on terrorism starts around 1970. So you’re only looking at about fifty years. It’s not because terrorism started then, of course, but because that’s when we’ve been able to measure it using these open databases. 

In terms of big-picture trends, looking globally, what happens is that you have relatively low rates of terrorism starting in 1970. That steadily increases until reaching a peak in about 1991, and then it begins to trail off. It’s hard to prove this, but my suspicion is that the turning point was the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, right before 9/11, you had probably the lowest point in the fifty-year history of terrorism data. After that, you get a rapid increase being fueled by groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, hitting a peak at about the end of the caliphate in 2014–2015. 

Looking over a fifty-year period, we found that Islamist and right-wing extremists are way more violent than left-wing extremists.

What about the US? My sense is that political violence was much more prevalent in the US in the 1970s than it is today.

The US rates look very different from the rest of the world. The US had the most activity in the ’70s. Back then, you had a variety of student groups, Black activists, Puerto Rican separatists. After the ’70s, the level of political violence in the United States begins to trail off, but in recent years it has started to pick up, driven primarily by right-wing extremists, and, to a lesser extent, Islamist cases. 

Given that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, how do you define political violence?

With the Pinkerton data, our idea from the beginning was that we wanted to preserve the legacy data, because we thought having longitudinal data would be very useful. So that moved us in the direction of trying to keep the definition they used. And fortunately, Pinkerton essentially used the US Department of Defense definition, which is a pretty general one. Essentially it involves violence or the threat of violence for a political purpose. It’s a little more complicated than that, but basically that sums it up. 

By that standard should we consider Antifa a domestic terrorist group? What about the Proud Boys? 

Yes, the Proud Boys would definitely qualify. Antifa is a more complicated case. We basically go where the definitions take us. At START, we maintain another dataset called PIRUS (Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States), and I think we do have some Antifa cases in there. We try to be as objective and as consistent as possible. So, for example, historically we have cases from South Africa involving attacks against the apartheid regime where you can certainly sympathize with the attackers, and yet if they fit the definitions we have established, we include them in the database. Sometimes people ask me, “Would you have included the Boston Tea Party?” And the answer is yes, we would have if it met the criteria. 

Continuing on that theme, I’ve spoken to some people who are fairly dismissive of the idea that looting and property destruction should be counted as political violence. Do you have a point of view on that? 

Basically, what we have tried to do is to create the broadest tent possible and then put flags in the data to allow people to define terrorism the way they want to define it. In general, we have included property crimes if they result in irreversible damage.

I've been surprised that we haven't seen that much left-wing terrorism yet. Certainly, it's been very light compared to the activities of the left during the 1960s and ’70s.

So if I throw a brick through a window, that doesn’t count? 

We’d only count it if we can get enough evidence about your intention. If it is just vandalism, then no. But if you throw a brick through the window and you scrawl “Death to the Jews” on the wall next to it, then we would include it. 

You’ve compared the prevalence of political violence among left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist extremists. What did you learn?

We did a large study on this, not too long ago, looking both internationally and also for the United States alone. And in both cases, looking over a fifty-year period, we found that Islamist and right-wing extremists are way more violent than left-wing extremists. 

You’ve said that right-wing perpetrators of political violence are more common in the US than in other countries. Do you have a theory on why that might be? 

I don’t have a very good answer for that, except to say that it seems to be a pretty long-standing situation. Right-wing political violence has been pretty uncommon in other parts of the world from about the ’80s on. I think in our worldwide database on terrorism, something like 4 percent of the cases are right-wing, whereas in the United States, right now it’s definitely a clear majority. For whatever reason, the political Right in the United States seems to feel that they are really being sidelined and cut out of the political process, and they seem more willing to use violence to settle the score. 

What role do you think political elites play here? Peter Coleman introduced me to the idea of stochastic terrorism. How much blame should we place on the shoulders of President Donald Trump and the other leaders who engage in heated political rhetoric?

I certainly wouldn’t put it all on Trump. The right-wing movement is much broader than Trump. But if you take the specific case of the January 6 insurrection, it’s very hard for me to look at that and say that Trump did not play a major role. The people who stormed the Capitol were clearly responding to thinly veiled suggestions from the president. I think there’s very strong evidence that Trump was instrumental in the January 6 insurrection. 

Let's face it, when we talk about terrorism, we are largely talking about young men.

What elements in our current political environment should we be keeping a particular eye out for in terms of their potential to spark domestic terrorism in the future? 

I think we’re in a very volatile situation right now. You have public opinion polls that show that many people, particularly Republicans, think that using violence for political ends is acceptable. We have tremendous polarization in terms of whether the 2020 election was stolen or not. That belief is pretty much an official part of the Republican platform. Certainly, all of the party’s leadership seems to be buying into it. I think the potential for terrorism is pretty frightening. Frankly, I’ve been surprised that we haven’t seen that much left-wing terrorism yet. Certainly, it’s been very light compared to the activities of the Left during the 1960s and ’70s. 

That may be changing. I’m thinking of the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and recent cases of antisemitic violence motivated by the war in Gaza. Or maybe you think I’m overreacting to a few isolated examples. 

I don’t think you are. You asked a moment ago about the big-picture trends. I’ve been looking at this data for a long time. One of the things that has impressed me is how wavelike terrorism is: once you start to get one form of it, it often builds. The trendline doesn’t look like an EKG, where it oscillates wildly up and down. Instead, it’s more like a wave. That tells me that once you start going in a particular direction, you tend to go in that direction for a while. Eventually, you’ll hit a peak. And frankly, we’re not all that good as social scientists at predicting where the peak is going to be. I don’t know if we are at the beginning of a new era for left-wing terrorism, but it very much bears watching.

What does the evidence say about the relationship between polarization and political violence? 

Well, we’re not in an experimental setting, so we’re always guessing to some extent. But I would certainly say that those two things—polarization and political violence—have traditionally been correlated in the United States.

As someone who has spent the bulk of my career in the nonprofit sector, I find myself drawn to Robert Putnam’s “bowling alone” argument, that civic engagement has declined as people pursue more solitary activities. I worry that over the years there’s been an erosion of participation in civil society. Nonprofits and other voluntary associations used to help us bring people together and bridge divides, but it doesn’t seem like they’re performing that role as well as they used to in American society. Does that idea resonate with you at all? 

It very much does. Let’s face it, when we talk about terrorism, we are largely talking about young men. And in all sorts of ways young men are in crisis right now. There’s some interesting scholarship talking about how young men in the Gilded Age went through a similar crisis. And society sort of responded in a way that I think Putnam would support—this is when the YMCAs were set up, when the Boy Scouts were set up, when there were all these institutions that were organized to sort of bring young men into the fold and help them avoid doing dangerous sorts of things. 

I think we are in a similar situation right now. You can see it in the voting patterns. In the last election, the voting patterns for young men and young women were strikingly different. I don’t think there’s been another period in history like it. So if you want to deal with terrorism, you have to deal with the problems of young men. Interestingly, we are not talking about minority men here. Unlike some other crime categories, terrorism tends to involve mostly young White men.

In terms of explaining terrorism, you want to try to get into the heads of the people who commit these acts to figure out what makes them tick. And a lot of times when we do this, we find an individual whose identity is being threatened in some way. 

I think that the conventional wisdom says that political extremism flourishes in places of economic hardship. But you’ve done some research into the relationship between domestic terrorism and unemployment that complicates that picture. 

From a criminology standpoint, economics usually is at least part of the explanation for rising crime rates. Less so with terrorism, however. Oftentimes, the individuals that get into terrorism, they’re not on the bottom of the food chain. Don’t get me wrong: they’re not at the top, either. They’re more like underperformers—people that are punching below their weight, that are not doing as well as they should be. 

I think in terms of explaining terrorism, you want to try to get into the heads of the people who commit these acts to figure out what makes them tick. And a lot of times when we do this, we find an individual whose identity is being threatened in some way. They feel like they’re being left behind, that they’re not being treated fairly, that they’re not being given a chance. And in that situation, there’s not as much difference as you would think between Osama bin Laden and Mother Teresa. When your identity is being threatened, there are different ways you can go to restore your identity and make yourself feel like you have some self-worth. And to some extent, I think whether you go the Mother Teresa route or the Osama bin Laden route is a matter of chance. 

You’ve also looked at the role of incarceration in sparking radical extremism. What did you find there? 

Prison is an amplifier, basically. In terms of predicting violence, at least, if you are radicalized in prison, you’re even more likely to be violent. So prison has a corrosive effect. Now, this study was only limited to the United States, but I think researchers in Europe have come to similar conclusions. 

You’ve argued that 9/11 changed policing in the United States in some pretty profound ways—that prioritizing counterterrorism meant deprioritizing community and problem-oriented policing. Talk to me about that transformation and what impact you think it has had. 

I think this transformation has really been underappreciated. I think the unfortunate impact of 9/11 is that it moved police much more to a sort of SWAT team mentality. And this was aided by programs that enabled the US military to turn over surplus equipment to urban police departments. 

If you look at the image of the police, I’d say there’s almost a straight line leading from 9/11 to George Floyd, where we end up with more and more aggressive police use of force. I think police changed their attitude about their role—they came to see their job as patrolling hostile territory as opposed to trying to work with citizens to come up with solutions. Frankly, I think a lot of people go into policing because it sounds kind of glamorous to be going in with weapons and knocking down doors to apprehend terrorism suspects as opposed to helping people get cats out of trees.

In fairness, it’s a really tough problem because if you want to take counterterrorism seriously, there’s no way to keep the police out of it. I don’t know how many FBI agents we have on terrorism right now, but it is maybe a couple thousand, whereas we have hundreds of thousands of police officers. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine any kind of effective counterterrorism without involving the police. 

I think we have this idea from watching television and movies that terrorism cases are solved through computer technology. But when you look at the cases that actually get solved, it’s almost always just on-the-ground, standard police work. It’s people coming forward as witnesses and informants. So if the community doesn’t trust the police, it’s going to be very difficult for them to be effective in policing terrorism.

I’ve spent most of my career in criminal justice reform. Many of my friends from that world are very skeptical that deterrence has any impact whatsoever. I’m wondering what you’ve learned, if anything, about deterrence and political violence. 

Again, we’re not in an experimental setting, so it’s difficult to say with certainty. But if you’re looking at the number of sworn officers and terrorism, I think the relationship is pretty weak. In the area of imprisonment, though, I think many criminologists would say that the big drop in crime that happened starting in the ’90s, probably about 25 percent of that could be attributed to increased imprisonment. I mean, you could debate whether it made political sense to do it, but I think it probably did have a measurable impact. So sometimes deterrence does seem to work. We looked at some of the things that Britain tried against the IRA in Northern Ireland. And one of the few things that seemed to work was this huge military buildup called Operation Motorman. It didn’t work in the long run, but it did have measurable effects in the short run. 

What about on the prevention side? What kind of investments should we be making there? 

I would go all in on Putnam’s idea. I think we need to do what we can to get disaffected groups to essentially buy into the legitimacy of the political system. A lot of the work people have been doing to reduce street crime and build greater confidence in the criminal justice system will probably also give you benefits when it comes to political violence as well. 

Are you hopeful as you look to the future?

I tend to be an optimist. The worldwide picture, in terms of terrorism at least, has been relatively calm. We’re even relaxing some of the requirements for getting on airplanes for the first time in many years. But I’m pretty nervous about our domestic situation in the United States and the extent to which we can survive and stay within a democratic regime.

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This is part of a series of interviews by Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, entitled “The Polarization Project.”  

Berman is co-editor of Vital City, an urban policy journal, and co-author of the book Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. In 2022, Berman led At the Crossroads, a series of interviews for HFG.org assessing the causes and solutions of rising crime in NYC after the pandemic.

This interview will also appear in The Fulcrum through a copublishing agreement.